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That said, even Mr. Becker acknowledges that Mr. Ford has "come into a position where he has to turn around a company that is losing money hand over fist." Executives at G.M. and Chrysler followed up the pledge Mr. Nasser made last year with pledges of their own. But in recent interviews, their chief executives reiterated that they had never promised to improve their average sport utility fuel economy 25 percent. Instead, they pointed out, they had pledged only to stay ahead of Ford. "Continuing to be better than Ford is what we said we'd do," said Rick Wagoner, chief executive of G.M. "We stack up very well against Ford � in fact, not just Ford. Particularly if you look at truck products, we stack up very well against Toyota (news/quote), or others, product by product." In fact, G.M. officials have said they were ahead of Ford's sport utilities, pickup trucks and minivans and would remain ahead. Mr. Zetsche of Chrysler had a similar position. "We have at least the same technology capabilities and the same willingness to improve fuel efficiency," he said. "Therefore I don't believe we would be at a disadvantage." G.M. has a slight lead over Ford and DaimlerChrysler (news/quote), the parent of Chrysler, judging by 2000 model projections made by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group based in Cambridge, Mass. The average for G.M.'s entire fleet was 24.2 miles a gallon, compared with 23.9 miles a gallon for Ford and 23.1 for DaimlerChrysler. All three were well behind the 26.4 miles a gallon average for Toyota and the 29.8 for Honda, largely because Japanese automakers sell a far smaller proportion of light trucks. The fuel economy of sport utilities and other light trucks and the nation's dependence on foreign oil is a subject of renewed debate as the country is at war. The rise of the sport utility lowered the miles per gallon of the average new vehicle produced last year to the lowest point in more than two decades, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That trend does not appear headed for much change soon. October was the biggest sales month in the industry's history, driven largely by a wave of interest-free financing deals that were great for buyers but costly for the Big Three. At the same time, G.M., Ford and Chrysler now all sell more light trucks than they do cars, and foreign automakers like Toyota are flooding the sport utility market. Thus, real fuel-economy gains are to be made with bigger vehicles like sport utilities, to which the market is moving, Mr. Ford said. "Our charge is to make those vehicles that they are buying as environmentally sound as we possibly can," he said recently, "because in the end we can't dictate customer choice, nor should we try to." Ford intends to improve the fuel economy of its fleet by doing things like making a hybrid electric-gasoline engine for its popular new Escape, a smaller sport utility. G.M. has similar plans for its GMC Sierra and Chevrolet Silverado pickups. Incremental improvements are also likely to be taken with technologies like more efficient transmissions, tire design, trimming weight and more efficient engine valves. By the end of the decade, the industry has said, it will begin producing the first crop of cars powered by fuel cells, which many see as a solution to gasoline consumption and the emission of global warming gases, though numerous hurdles remain to making fuel cells an affordable solution. A 25 percent improvement in sport utility fuel economy alone would not wean the country of its dependence on Middle East oil but could be part of a broader strategy to do so. For instance, if the fuel-economy requirement for all light trucks were raised to the level of cars, a jump of about seven miles a gallon, roughly a million barrels of oil a day would eventually be saved, out of the 19 million barrels consumed every day in the United States. This is a goal environmentalists say can be easily reached, largely with existing technologies, but auto executives argue that that would be prohibitively costly in the next few years. The savings would be more than half of the 1.7 million barrels a day the United States imports from Saudi Arabia, which provides most of the oil imported by the country from the Middle East. A similar toughening of requirements for passenger cars could make up the difference. Environmental groups have been losing these arguments for some time. The last change in corporate average fuel economy standards for cars came in 1989 and in 1994, by a small increment, for light trucks. But the Senate will start wrangling over a new energy bill in coming months in a political climate reshaped by the terrorist attacks |
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